Spring 2017 Undergraduate English Courses: Film

354:360 Film Noir

More than a genre, style, period or sensibility, film noir is a critical construct applied after the fact to some of the greatest, and darkest, films of Hollywood's "golden age." But no classical era filmmaker ever set out to make a film noir or even recognized that anything especially different was happening during the height of the film noir era. We will examine noir's roots in German expressionism and French poetic realism (communicated by a generation of émigré filmmakers), and how these imported styles interacted with the hard-boiled American pulp fiction of writers like Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich. Because film noir is as much a critical movement as a body of classic films, we will also look at its defining texts, and how these provided a detailed road map for the self-conscious neo-noir cinema of the 1970s and 80s.